In West Lebanon, New Hampshire, the Woodstock Soapstone Company builds wood-burning stoves. A woodstove is essentially a firebox with a chimney. Installed in a living room, it can heat a home all winter. Company president Tom Morrisey is excited to show off the company’s newest creation—a stove with three-foot long, stainless steel antlers sticking out of the sides.

“When people look at the moose, they laugh,” says Morrisey. “And then they say, ‘Are you really gonna do this?’”

Woodstock makes most of its stoves from cast iron and slabs of soapstone. But by building this one from stainless steel, it will cost almost half as much as the company’s other models. The antlers are interchangeable with any design the customer wants.

“If you’re a member of the 99 percent,” says Morrisey, “you should be able to buy something that’s not just a black box.”

Woodstove sales are up all over the country. But they sell best among frugal Yankees, who are disproportionately reliant on heating oil. New England and New York consume 86 percent of the nation’s number two heating oil. Wood is cheaper than oil, and wood-burning technologies have become highly efficient.

Hartford High School in White River Junction, Vermont gets most of its heat from burning wood chips. The furnace automatically feeds itself chips—about 30 tons per week—and a thermostat sets the temperature for the entire building. Byron Baribou, facilities director for the school district, says wood has become almost as reliable as oil.

“When we first started back in the mid-90s,” Baribou says, “we dealt with the individual sawmills. If the mill closed down for Christmas, we couldn’t get chips.”

By burning chips all winter long, the school cuts its heating bill in half.

Technology isn’t just improving for big, automated systems. Woodstock Soapstone’s “moose stove” will soon be the most efficient, EPA-certified cordwood stove on the market.

“Older stoves were basically six-sided boxes that you put wood in,” says company president Morrisey. Now, he says, secondary combustion chambers and catalytic converters have made woodstoves as efficient as oil furnaces.

These jumps in efficiency are only possible because there’s so much wood in the Northeast. University of Maine forestry professor Rob Lilieholm says there is more forest here today than at any point in the last 200 years.

“We see this huge return of the forest, which is really in a lot of ways unique in human history because we also saw a big increase in population.”

If you heat with wood in the Northeast, 80 cents on the dollar stay in the region, says Adam Sherman, a consultant with Biomass Energy Resource Center in Vermont. He points to Vermont’s capital as an example of how the region can grow sustainably.

“The city of Montpelier is laying a grid of hot water delivery systems to the downtown, tying off of a wood chip heating plant. That’s a very innovative project that we’ll see more of.”

Right now, the Northeast only gets four percent of its heat from wood. But an industry study say that share could increase to almost 20 percent if projects like the one in Montpelier catch on.

In 2011, about 140,000 American horses were eaten abroad. But they weren’t slaughtered in the U.S. When America closed its last horse slaughter plants five years ago, American horse buyers turned their trucks north and south to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada. From there, most of the meat goes to the European Union.

But American horses are given drugs that humans should not consume. Silky Shark was one of those horses. His former owner, Ken Terpenning of Lexington, Ky., has owned over two dozen racehorses, but Silky Shark made a big impression.

“Silky Shark was everything you’d want in a racehorse,” says Terpenning. “He was vibrant, fiery, a very happy horse. On the racetrack, he was a total professional. He earned over $100,000 in his career.”

When Terpenning fell on tough times, he sold Silky Shark to a man he trusted. But then the horse was resold again, and again, eventually winding up in a Canadian slaughterhouse.

It’s perfectly legal to flip horses in this manner. But Silky Shark was given Phenylbutazone, or “Bute.” Bute is the most common anti-inflammatory drug administered to horses; it’s also a carcinogen for humans.

“Horses are not raised as livestock,” Crosland says. “They’re given drugs when they need them. People aren’t holding back.”

With Belgium, France and Italy topping the list, the European Union is the primary market for American horses slaughtered in Canada. Dan Jorgensen, a member of the European Parliament, is getting fed up with the system as it is.

“I think it’s quite concerning,” MEP Jorgensen says, “that European consumers might actually be buying and eating horsemeat that we don’t have any reason to believe is healthy.”

MEP Jorgensen says the EU’s laws are strict, but enforcement just hasn’t happened, particularly outside of the EU. He wants to pressure Canadians to stop letting tainted meat from slipping through the system.

Until that happens, more than 1,000 American horses a week will be slaughtered in Canada.

Back in Lexington, Ky., Ken Terpenning is waiting for someone to regulate the system.

“I just wish it was done. I look at [Silky Shark’s] pictures on my wall every day and I just still can’t believe it.”